Working inside a presidential administration certainly opens doors. Between the public exposure that comes from a cabinet or senior staff position and the connections inevitably made by anyone employed at the highest levels of the US federal government, White House alumni enjoy an enviable range of choices once they hit the job market — not to mention tremendous latitude to put their talents and experience to work for worthy causes should they so choose. Given the particular frustration felt by many in the Obama administration after the Democrats’ 2010 midterm wipeout, a post-political career comes with the added perk of real professional freedom. No longer faced with Republican obstructionism, the sluggishness of the federal bureaucracy, or the chaotic developments of an unstable world, those who served an especially popular, two-term president are now blissfully unconstrained — and thus at liberty to advocate for the progressive vision that was so often thwarted when they worked in government.

Former White House press secretary Jay Carney is a case in point, having recently been in the news thanks to a series of ham-fisted social media posts on behalf of his chosen employer: Amazon. Charged with overseeing PR, Carney (and a number of Amazon surrogate accounts) has been taking direct shots at figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as renewed scrutiny comes down on the company amid its efforts to defeat a widely followed union drive in Bessemer, Alabama. “With all due respect, Senator @BernieSanders, you’re wrong on this,” said Carney from his personal account in response to a video supportive of the effort. “We treat our employees with dignity and respect. We offer a $15 min wage, health care from day one, and a safe, inclusive workplace.” The spirit of this statement is, to put it mildly, difficult to reconcile with the company’s exhaustive push to defeat unionization — to say nothing of its well-documented workplace safety issues or the (recently reconfirmed) revelation that its workers are sometimes forced to urinate into bottles (a reality explicitly denied by the PR machine Carney helps oversee).

Carney, of course, is far from the only former Obama official to plant his professional flag in corporate America — or advocate against the interests of its most underpaid and exploited workers. In 2015, Robert Gibbs — a fellow press secretary for the administration — became global chief communications officer for McDonald’s while the company lobbied against raising the minimum wage (a practice it didn’t officially cease until 2019). California’s Proposition 22, which could see gig drivers earning as little as $5.64 an hour and has been dubbed “the most radical undoing of labor legislation since Taft-Hartley in 1947” by labor law professor Veena Dubal, has the fingerprints of Obama alumni all over it: its intellectual framework having been quite literally codesigned by former Labor secretary Seth Harris, whose post-administration work was summarized by the Prospect’s Max Moran last year as follows: